We’ll start off by sending emails to InCommon Executives and InCommon Site Administrators with reports about how each organization’s metadata conforms or does not conform to the required parts of Baseline Expectations.

To begin with, we’ll update you on the health of your metadata about once a month. In the future, we’ll automate these reports and we may notify you more frequently. We also plan to start giving you real-time health checks via the Federation Manager user interface (at a date yet to be determined).

If you want to check if your metadata meets Baseline Expectations, you can ask your InCommon Site Administrators (appointed by the InCommon Executive for each organization) to make sure that each SAML entity descriptor contains:

If you need to update your InCommon Site Administrators, please ask your InCommon Executive (usually the person who was named as the Executive on your signed InCommon Participation Agreement) to use the resources available on the InCommon Roles page

In the coming months, you’ll hear about the policy and process changes that will support this increased level of attention to detail in InCommon metadata. We’ve held two webinars already, including one on February 21 about the health checks.

The next webinar is March 7 (2 pm ET) with information about legal, policy, and business process issues related to Baseline Expectations. This webinar will include a discussion about the collaboration and dispute resolution processes under development by the InCommon Community Trust and Assurance Board (CTAB). Details, including links to recorded webinars and connecting information for March 7, are on the Baseline Expectation wiki.